Blaine Pardoe - Lost Eagles: One Mans Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars

LOST EAGLES

One Mans Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars

BLAINE PARDOE

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

ANN ARBOR

Copyright by Blaine Pardoe 2010

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

2013 2012 2011 2010 4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pardoe, Blaine, 1962

Lost eagles : one mans mission to find missing airmen in two world wars / Blaine Pardoe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-472-11752-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. World War, 19141918Missing in actionIdentification. 2. World War, 19391945Missing in actionIdentification. 3. World War, 19141918Aerial operations, American. 4. World War, 1939 1945Aerial operations, American. 5. AirmenUnited StatesHistory20th century. 6. Zinn, Frederick Wilhelm, 18921960.

I. Title.

DS639.M56P37 2010

940.48dc22 2010030239

ISBN13: 978-0-472-02787-3 (electronic)

Jacket photo: Frederick Zinns sopwith aircraft, which crashed during World War I. National Museum of the United States Air Force Archives.

This book is dedicated to all of the men and women that are yet to be recovered and returned home with honor. Each Memorial Day, we honor not just those buried under white crosses and the Star of David but those that remain on the far-flung battlefields where Americans disappeared into the mists of historymissing in action. While not marked with a grave, they are not forgotten.

It would be easy to dedicate this book to Fred Zinn, but he was far too humble in life to accept such a distinction and it would be wrong to do so now. For him, it was about the families of the missing men he hunted for and the men themselves. In keeping with that spirit, in honor of Frederick Zinn, this book commemorates the airmen he recovered and those still awaiting discovery and identification. This work is especially dedicated to the men detailed in this book.

KENYON ROPER

CYRUS GATTON

LESTER HARTER

LYMAN CASE

RAYMOND PARKER

EMILE JACK SELIG JR.

HOWARD I. KINNE

ALVIN TREADWELL

ROSWELL FULLER

PHILLIP E. HASSINGER

VICTOR CHAPMAN

WILLIAM HESTER

JOHN F. MERRILL

JOHN N. MCELROY

PROLOGUE

Some day they will return with honor not all, but some

Brochure from Fred Zinns Memorial Air Show, Battle Creek, MI, 1962

As an author you sometimes are granted the privilege of ensuring that some of our priceless history is not lost. Such is the case with Frederick W. Zinn. It is a story of how our nation treats its honored dead. How our military helps families come to terms with their loss speaks volumes about who we are as a people. The quest to locate and bring home the dead or their possessions from war is almost as compelling as the story of the wars themselves. This was something that Fred Zinn understood more than most people. We are defined by how we honor those that have died for us.

In doing research for this book I spent a day with my daughter copying Zinns extensive files at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. While waiting in the lobby for our escort I glanced up at the carved Airmens Creed etched in stone for visitors. The last stanza of that creed struck me the most, I will leave never leave an airman behind It dawned on me, at that very moment, that I was writing about the man that line was based on. The entire concept of not leaving an airman behind was started by Frederick W. Zinn. In a time before Crime Scene Investigation, before DNA testing, a lone man who wandered the fields of France, Italy, and Sicily searching for missing airmen and ensuring they were brought home. Such a man deserved a book about his missiona mission that continues on to this day.

The World War I, the Great War, was a meat grinder in terms of human death. The war devastated a generation of young men in Europe. The numbers alone tell the story; 8.5 million were killed, another 21 million wounded, and 7.7 million were made prisoners of war. The war began in 1914 under the belief that it would only last a few months. Four and a half years later it had consumed millions of people and laid the foundation for another, even more devastating war. It was a war that ushered in the U-boat, combat aircraft, poison gas, mines, flamethrowers, rapid-fire artillery, and an array of weaponry that was geared to kill, maim, or cripple.

There are no statistics as to how many men survived the entirety of the war, but those numbers are woefully small. Weapons technology saw to that, combined with the deadly stalemate that trench warfare brought to the Western Front. Of the men that enlisted or were mobilized in 1914, only a few thousand were still in fighting trim in 1918. Most of the combatants that followed were newer recruits that had joined the war effort after the conflict started. Of those seasoned veterans that survived the entire duration of the war, almost all bore the scars of their wounds and memories of the most horrific conflict up until that time.

Air warfare had its own breed of carnage. Just over a decade after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, aircraft had been turned into weapons of war. Crude at first, these weapons resembled box kites with clunky engines and machine guns. In the early years of the war, pilots and observers that went into the skies more often fell victim to their planes falling apart than to enemy fire. When Anthony Fokker introduced an interrupter gear for the airplane, allowing a machine gun to easily fire through a spinning propeller, the war in the skies became even more deadly.

The life expectancy of a pilot was around three weeks at the front. Young men, primarily the best and brightest college students or recent graduates, started volunteering to join the fledgling U.S. Air Service (USAS), as well as the Royal Flying Corps and the French Air Service (Aronautique Militaire). The fate of those that did not survive was as lethal as those men locked in a tug-of-war over the trench lines but was made more glamorous to the public because of the machines they flew. Pilots and observers were seen as gallant knights of the air in a war that lacked romantic imagery. In reality it was a brutal duty that prematurely aged the select few aviators that developed the skills necessary to survive.

Not all of the heroes were aces

One of the most deadly duties a man could assume in a cockpit was that of aerial observation and photography. In this role planes with a pilot and an observer would fly over enemy lines to secure images of troop movements and artillery placements and assist in adjusting artillery barrages. The observer would handle a bulky wooden camera and take images of the ground below while the pilot tried to avoid enemy pursuit planes. Later in the war observers worked with wireless sets, communicating to artillery batteries to guide their shots on the entrenched targets thousands of feet below. This was done from an open cockpit, exposed to the freezing winds, often under fire.

Anti-aircraft fireknown as archiewas trained on the observation airplanes intent on blasting them out of the skies. Such aircraft were prime targets for enemy pursuit planes and were often seen as easy victories. It was a fear-filled job. In open cockpits at five to ten thousand feet, the thin, bone-chilling air made every movement painful and difficult. Explosions from anti-aircraft shells tossed a steady hot rain of blasted iron at the highly flammable aircraft.